Who had a weirder year than Syracuse?

That's not a rhetorical question. Seriously, think about it: Division I college basketball comprises 351 institutions of higher learning. It has elite private academies with outsized endowments and huge sociopolitical sway. It has tiny, regional, off-the-map outposts. It has big-business athletics machines where boosters put their names on million-dollar facilities so that future pros walk through the increasingly top-of-the-line doors. It has thousands of coaches and even more thousands of players, and every one of them has a story.

It's a huge sample set, right? There must be someone, surely.

Well, who? Because in 2015-16, the Syracuse Orange men's basketball team ...

• beat UConn and Texas A&M to win the Battle 4 Atlantis in November,

• lost at home to Wisconsin when Wisconsin was terrible,

• bade a sudden farewell to its legendary coach, Jim Boeheim, when his nine-game suspension for NCAA violations was moved up from "ACC play" to "ASAP" after appeal,

• lost at St. John's by 12 points,

• started conference play 0-4,

• went 4-5 in Boeheim's absence,

• went 8-1 upon his return,

• beat Duke at Duke,

• lost four of its last five games (against a tough schedule, but still),

• lost to Pitt in its first ACC tournament game,

• contrary to most projections, both got in the NCAA tournament and escaped the play-in in Dayton,

• made a late comeback to beat Gonzaga in the Sweet 16,

• trailed No. 1-seeded Virginia 54-39 with 9:30 left to play in the second half, went on a 25-4 run and became the first team in Tony Bennett's UVa. tenure to overcome a second-half deficit en route to a win, and

• went to the Final Four.

Most programs don't experience this many bizarre lows and giddy highs in five years, let alone five months. It would be difficult to process anywhere, but particularly at Syracuse, where Boeheim has spent three decades astride one of the nation's most stylistically consistent, and consistently successful, programs.

Fortunately, things are about to get a whole lot easier. Because as crazy as it was, the Orange's 2015-16 also looks like a prelude to a much more stable -- which is to say, a predictably solid, top-25-ish campaign -- 2016-17.

This return to normalcy isn't guaranteed, but it does feel likely. That's especially true if Malachi Richardson, the chief engineer of his team's furious comeback win over Virginia, returns for an encore.

Despite his 23-point performance in the Elite Eight, and a very solid turn in the Final Four loss to North Carolina, Richardson usually was disappointing as a freshman. He shot just 39 percent from inside the arc and 35 percent beyond it, and turned the ball over more often per-possession than his assists (even in ACC play, when his assist rate picked up). Yet he was a McDonald's All-American, and he's obviously talented -- you don't shake Malcolm Brogdon for a step-back 3 with a Final Four bid on the line without some serious basketball genes in your corner -- and his late-season surge has NBA scouts interested in his late-first-round, early second-round potential.

That said, Richardson's projections are all over the board, and it will be tough for some scouts to talk themselves into the potential of a 20-year-old freshman whose best basketball came in a flurry of high-profile games late in an otherwise unimpressive statistical season. Which is likely why Richardson entered the draft without hiring an agent: He has the option to return if his sporadic projections prove false. And if he is drafted, you can understand why -- the idea of Richardson harnessing the ability he showed in the tournament, and unleashing it across an entire season of basketball, is also one of the main reasons to be excited about the Orange next season.

Hope is hardly lost if Richardson does depart, though it would make life slightly more difficult in Central New York. Guards Trevor Cooney and Michael Gbinije -- the former a four-year stalwart, the latter a converted small forward who was one of the ACC's best all-around players at the point a season ago -- are out of the picture. The good news: Freshman forward Tyler Lydon, another of the Orange's clutch postseason heroes (see the game-winning block against Gonzaga, among other highlights), announced he won't even flirt with the NBA draft. Former Providence center Paschal Chukwu will get on the court after a transfer year off it. Rebounding specialist Tyler Roberson is back. And top 100 freshmen Tyus Battle and Matthew Moyer will help mitigate losses (or add depth, or both) at the point guard and frontcourt spots, respectively.

That mix of talent on the floor is all well and good, of course, but the best reason to be bullish on Syracuse's future originates with the man who stands just a foot or two off of it. Boeheim -- who has faced understandable questions about his potential retirement in the coming years, or, hey, maybe sooner? -- is still here. He's still awesome at being a basketball coach. And he's feeling energized, even at 71.

""I’m really not that tired," Boeheim said just after April's national semifinal loss. "I had thirty days off."

It's just one more way Division I's strangest 2015-16 season set up what should be a far more understandable 2016-17. Syracuse will be talented, athletic, tough up front and will play a brutal, shifty, trademark form of 2-3 zone. If a Final Four run is in the offing, it won't come as some sort of blessed, bizarre beating of the odds; it'll be business as usual. The Orange will be good. Possibly very good. And there's nothing weird about that.